Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is the public cloud offering from Google, and it's rapidly becoming more and more important for developers to learn about. Just using GCP’s core services will give you everything you need to begin your journey to the cloud. You can start with GCP’s infrastructure as a service (IaaS), creating virtual machines with the resources you need.

Like other cloud providers, with GCP, you only pay for what you use. GCP has a pricing structure that rewards you for using it—the more you use, the bigger your discount. And it's worth mentioning that GCP integrates natively with other Google products like Gmail, Docs, and Hangouts.

If you don't want or need to administer servers, GCP also has a platform as a service (PaaS) offering, which lets Google manage your infrastructure. While you’ll always share that responsibility with Google, the idea is that you can focus on creating cool products and let Google take care of the servers. You can spin up a MySQL or a PostgreSQL database in just a few clicks and start using it in your application.

But what's perhaps garnering the most attention in GCP is the PaaS offering for Kubernetes. It’s not a surprise that this is being offered; after all, Google has been using containers and orchestrators for several years now. There's no doubt that GCP has the best offering for Kubernetes as a managed service.

Last but not least, GCP also offers serverless services that allow you to upload your code and let Google handle the infrastructure at the scale you need.

In this course, we'll cover the ground services from GCP. You'll also be able to practice what you learn with useful labs.